"At daybreak we stopped to change to fresh horses, and as I turned loose the stallion I signed to Little Wolf: 'There! Take your horse!'
"'I shall never put a rope on him! You saved my life; that enemy would have killed me but for you. The horse is yours,' he signed back, and went away off our trail and hung the medicine sacks in the brush where any pursuers we might have would never see them. He gave them to the sun.
"Well, when we got back to the mouth of the Bighorn we found that the Pi-kun-i had started for the Snow Mountains several days before, so after one night in the Crow camp we five took up their trail. I spent that last night in Little Wolf's lodge, and we planned to meet often again, and to go on more raids together. His last words, or signs, rather, to me were: 'Do not forget that no matter what others may do, you and I shall always be friends!'
"'Yes! Friends always,' I answered, and rode away. I have never seen him since that time."
So ended Ancient Otter's story. It heartened me. If his friend was still alive--and he certainly had not been killed in the big fight--he would be with us for making peace, as well as Mad Plume's sister. Said Mad Plume to me: "You now know why Ancient Otter is with us. He told the story to you; we knew it!"
The next morning broke very cold; the air was full of fine frost flakes; the snow was drifted and in places very deep. We unhobbled our horses, saddled them and struck off through the timber toward the mouth of the Bighorn soon after sunrise. An hour or so later we crossed the river on the ice, and turned up the valley of the Bighorn. Here I again said to myself that I was traversing country that people of my race had never seen, but I was mistaken. I learned years afterward that a Lewis and Clark man, named Cotter, had come west again in 1807, and had trapped on the headwaters of the Bighorn, and followed it down to its junction with the Yellowstone.
We saw great numbers of the different kinds of game that morning, and the sight that most impressed me was the trees full of grouse, or prairie chickens, as the whites call them. We passed hundreds of cottonwoods in which the birds were almost as plentiful as apples in an apple tree. They sat motionless upon their perches, their feathers all fluffed out, and paid not the slightest attention to us as we passed under them.